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I love these round-table cable news discussions between "reasonable" people who just can't understand for the life of them why anyone would be so absolutist about such a trivial thing as free speech.

"We're not talking about banning violent video games," MSNBC "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough says, reasonably to his reasonable panel of guests, "But the government has a right to regulate." After all, Scarborough reasons, they regulate pornography---and how are digital games really any different than films that involve real people committing sexual acts for money?

Al Sharpton intones, reasonably enough, that "the abuse of the second amendment cannot be met with the abuse of the first amendment." The public has a "right" to oppose tasteless free speech, Sharpton argues, such as vulgar rap music. We play fast and loose with the word "right" by the way.

I want to channel Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means...."

Of course, it's these reasonable people who believe they are the best arbiters of what is "abuse" and what is not, and that naturally all reasonable people can and should agree on which "regulations" would help stop all this dangerous abuse.

The real problem is the "coarsening of America" Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski reasonably suggests. This is a subtle reference to the "good old days" when America was less coarse and more civilized, and bad things never happened because all our young people were brought up on Chicken Soup and Leave it to Beaver, and the streets were lined with cheese.

Of course, those "good old days" back before America was so coarsened included segregated schools, elderly people without a safety net, Jim Crow laws, two World Wars, and massive poverty all before the widespread adoption of television, let alone the advent of the terrifying "violent video game" or any other modern cultural bogey men.

Watching this panel reminds me once again why I fear bi-partisanship and moderation more than extremism in our government. At least the latter is often hamstrung by its own excesses; the former is more insidious.